The Shizzle in the Dizzle So, I’m talking to some friends on my patio. Minding my own business. Not expecting a crazy, unusual thing to happen. Not at all. Merely passing the last days of summer with good times, good people, and good gawd there’s a mouse! Minutes before, I had looked over to see my docile pup scrounging about in the overgrown bushes. He’s after a toad. I said to my friends with the false confidence any new parent or new dog owner should avoid using, especially around any seasoned parents or experienced dog owners. Because right when you think you have their habits and quirks down cold- they scare a flipping mouse up a bush. Yup, my dorky dog treed a mouse. Mid-conversation, I glance over and two feet from my startled eyes is a trembling mouse. It’s directly at my eye level. It’s clinging to the very tippy top of the weigela bush, swaying in the breeze like some kind of poorly made rodent flag. Of course, I immediately drew everyone’s attention to this little critter who had braved heights to avoid becoming kibble. I have never seen a mouse so still, so close, and so awkwardly stuck up a creek with no paddle. I got close enough to see this was a personable little fella. His wide eyes were fathomless and his small body indicated that he was clearly more of an intellect than a handy type. As evidence, consider his big head with those tensely alert ears and his velvety smooth coat of fur- obviously well preened and not accustomed to mousual labor. Okay, I fell hard for the little bugger. Unfortch, I had seven children and three adults witness to my predicament. They encouraged me to trap it and set it free miles from here. But that involves me going near it and putting it in my car! First, I picked up my dog so he could see his prize swinging in the breeze. Then, I crated the daring doggy. Next time, pup, next time. Next, under the pretense of finding gloves, bucket and a poking tool, I grabbed my camera. I took this very picture:

And in doing so, I lost my chance to nab that sucker. He hopped/fell to a lower branch which he clung to in the same fashion for a minute, and then he fell to the ground, scampered across the patio, and into the bushes. Never to be seen again.

So far.

During his sprint, chaos bloomed in the form of ten helpful humans. A child picked up a croquet mallet and began putt putting for that rascally rabbit. I threw the camera and dove for a storage bin and a shovel fondly dubbed the poop shovel due to its primary purpose in my yard. My friend panicked about the wide open door and saved my family from mouse invasion by throwing herself backwards through the door and then slamming it shut. Whew.

There was screaming. There was freaking out as each of us thought the mouse was scaling our bodies at different moments. A shoe was thrown. A butt was sprained by an anonymous woman tripping on her thrown camera.

Another day in the life, ya’ll.

And people ask how I think of things to blog about.

For gregorific, it’s more a question of how to pick from the mass of topics knocking down my door and scampering up my bushes.

~Happy summer’s end, people.

An optimist is someone who gets treed by a lion but enjoys the scenery.~Walter Winchell

Yours truly, gregorific, has been selected as a finalist in a poetry contest! Who knew? The Poetry Institute is my new best friend. More details to follow. Since my poem is a finalist, it will be included in their print anthology.

I'm writing the biographical blurb to go in the back. It’s hard! I did my best here on gregorific. Knowing it will be in print and I won’t be able to go in and tweak it as I feel inclined is different.

But now is the time to celebrate. Take every chance you can, right? To appreciate: the small joys, the everyday blessings, the wonder of the ordinary. Yes, there will be cookies. Since you’ve been so gregorific to hop along for the ride, please enjoy a cookie for yourself. Or two.

Look before you…press SEND. We’ve all done it. Pressed SEND and then felt the cold prickle of regret wind up our spine. But you can’t get it back. It’s gone. It’s been SENT. If you were starring in a movie, (and let’s face it, we all are in our own way, right?) you’d have the option of tracking down the mail carrier and bribing her to rip the letter up. Or you would give the receptionist his favorite sweet treat and surreptitiously slide the envelope out of the stack of incoming mail. If you’d left a regrettable telephone message, then movie you would break in and erase it from the machine. You know the type of movie I’m talking about. Those movies are now dated. They are from the pre ‘online-all-the-time’ era. OLD movies. New movies will have to change the post-SEND angst to a different point of the regret timeline. Somewhere between the pressing SEND and the message actually reaching the recipient’s inbox, there needs to be a way to scramble around and freak out. Are we talking a millisecond here? (Paging all geeks, we need to know the time it takes to SEND an email, and don’t tell me it’s instantaneous.) There needs to be some hope it can be retracted; some time to flail about in regret… and then there you have it- the stakes of your whole movie. Why is gregorific landing on this topic? Because of the recent panic over supposed ebook piracy which set one online lending site out of legitimate business. With the power of social media at our fingertips, we must think before we SEND. In this particular case, a bit of research about the lending site would have helped a person understand that it was connecting people interested in lending already purchased ebooks; not helping people steal them. The situation with Lendink also emphasizes the importance of fully understanding your contract with epublishers. Many e-authors really didn’t know their books could be lent in this manner and their upset could have been avoided if they had understood that part of their contract. I have been trying to figure out how to lend the ebooks I have bought for my ipad/kindle. If I can’t loan e-versions, I will stick to buying paper and ink. I mentioned this in my last two posts when I was espousing the virtues of the printed book. After checking to see if my ebooks are lending enabled, I was on the verge of using Lendink. Until it was put out of business by waves of online outrage. This can happen in any instance. (Think: parenting, politics, rumors, boycotts.) Being quick to pull the trigger is almost never a good strategy. Especially with social media because we are bridging new territory. For your own self protection, you must look before you leap (or post, or press SEND, or epublish.) If you don’t understand something, the glorious thing is that you can easily find out what you need to know online. It’s easy to find the information if you look with a discerning eye. It’s also easy to find someone else panicking and band together to find even more chaos. Be careful and save your righteous outrage for the real deal. Take your time. If you are being wronged then you will want to carefully consider your response/reaction. Your typed words are there forever once you press SEND. You can’t throw it in the fire, spill ink across the page, or pretend you never said it. It’s out there. So, take it from gregorific, but a baby to the complex techisphere: Look before you press SEND. Just Sayin’, gregorific

Certain books mean something special. We all have our mental Most Valuable Player books, right? It’s not always the story. Sometimes it’s the feel of the pages when you’re at a turning point in your life and you need that fragile security to hold onto. Or it could be MVP because of the essence of where you held the book. Lying in a hammock, basking in the sun. Before you knew or cared about skin cancer- alive and oblivious to danger except what was typed in the pages you turned. Or a road trip where you found a book and stayed up into the night reading by flashlight in a forgettable hotel room. Books resonate with readers for different reasons. It can be therapeutic to consider what books mean something to you and why. I am surprised to find many of the books I love have more to do with who I was when I discovered them than the content of the pages. The perfect book at the perfect time. Or the perfect book at the worst time. Both can be powerful.

Little WomenI was gifted with a special edition of Little Women. It had blue gilded pages and a super soft sheen to the cover material. This was maybe the first book I cherished. I read it in dry, clean places and worried about how to take care of it. Yes, a book. A fancy book given to a ten-year-old. Not to mention what joy and intensity reading the pages brought me. It makes me feel safe knowing it’s still on my shelf in my living room. Not just for my girls to read soon, but to stake my childhood down in a spot I can revisit.

Agatha ChristieWhy can’t I give away my collection of more than 50 of her paperback mysteries? I felt safe in high school reading them. In real life, I couldn’t figure out who was popular or why. But I could pretty well figure out that Miss Marple was gonna crack the case and Hercule Poirot was going to make everyone squirm…and then crack the case.

Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky made me esoterically depressed about the meaning of love for the first time. The cover still brings me back to that feeling, almost to the point of a tight throat. Bowles style and humor is like Hemingway and Shakespeare combined. (To me.)

The Painted Bird, Being There, PinballEvery book by Kosinski put in a blender and gulped down was my exact college experience. It is what I wanted, feared, and knew nothing about. His books astound me.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips Her books were there for me at a time in my life when the only thing I was thinking about were my babies. My every action seemed to center around them. When the lights were out I’d read SEP romances in the few blinks my tired eyes had left. It kept that ‘me’ part of me that needed to be held tightly.

Twilight Twilight is the sort of book that captures a yearning that we all have felt at some time, in some way. Not everyone wants to acknowledge that yearning and I’m not sure if it comes from a completely organic place. But it’s there in us all. When I recognized what it was that I loved about her writing, I was inspired to write a novel. Thank you, Stephanie Meyers.

Olive KitteridgeElizabeth Strout swooped in and knocked me off my feet with her profoundly funny, deeply resonant, and honestly sad snippets of real life. In a composed way, she manages to say what ruthless thoughts many of us think and then twists the mirror back on the reader for a painful, shocking revelation.

SpeakSpeak is just the kind of thing I wish I could write. It has depth and meaning on many levels and yet is funny and heartfelt. Laurie Halse Anderson captures a gut wrenching moment during a difficult time of life and painlessly teaches the reader the value of open-minded compassion. Her mastery in seamlessly combining craft, subject, and humor is something that I greatly admire.

What are the books that take you back to a distinct place and time? Which reads have touched you deeply? For whatever reason: timing, character, age when read, place you read it, who gave it to you... the list goes on and on.

Now let me ask you: What if the movies you love were remade with different actresses and sets? But the same script. Would they be the same story? A different format but the same content. Hmmm. I think it would be a different experience. The same thing in an alternate perspective. (This is me wondering if ebooks have the same sensory impact.)

The ticka ticka ticka my finger feels while running over the spines of books on my shelves makes me physically happy. Every title gives me a shiver of how I felt reading it: lonely, amazed, offended, blissed out.

Some of the books on my shelf I haven’t read yet. I bought most for a dollar at my local library. Having these future literary forays lined up on my shelf makes me feel that there is always something special at my fingertips. That unlimited possibility is why I collect books and keep them around. Even when my ipad, shelfari, and laptop could hold a wall full of books, I don’t want just that one dimensional medium for something so endlessly dimensional. I like my living space to be lined with literary wallpaper, reflecting my personal tastes and giving me a sense of calm and grounding when I sit among my old friends and meet a new one.

Oldie but Goodie? A tangible book is something more than a story. It’s a memory. When I pull out a favorite book from my shelf, I remember who I was and what I felt when I initially read it. But as publishing changes from all print to some print to …no print? Will the traditional printed-on-paper book become an oldie but a goodie? Like record players and VCRs? My ipad grants me immediate access to just about any book I want- which is convenient and easy. But like so much in our lives today, easy and convenient doesn’t meet my emotional needs. My ipad will never replace (only supplement) my shelves of paperback mysteries, dog-eared romances, beautifully bound classics, and inscribed favorites. To me, e-readers are like digital pictures that are never printed out. Yes, it happened. You were there and you have proof- but it’s not tangible. I don’t like algebra either. Not only do I have pictures printed out from every year since I owned a camera, I also have books from pivotal Kodak moments in my life. The books mean something to me, not just in theory but in tactile, sensory presence. I love looking at my shelf and seeing the range I’ve covered, the places I’ve gone and grown from, and the books I have yet to read. I like pulling one out and loaning it to a friend- something I am not able to do with most of the ebooks I’ve purchased. (The newer releases are often not loan enabled. I hope this changes soon.) My next post will cover some of the books that mean something to me. The significance could be: when I read it, who I was at the time, or where I was, or who I was with when I bought it, read it, or finished it. I get a visceral feeling from these books and I will not be selling them to afford a kindle. What books do you keep on the shelf? Which ones bring up a strong memory? Why?

I haven't been online in...days! I'm barely surviving on fresh air and breathtaking scenery. My vacay in Maine was lovely, dark and deep; but I have blogs to keep. So I'm back at it ya'll!

My apologies for those of you gregorific fans who were worried. I did not sink into an abyss but merely went to the idyllic homestead in Maine where I managed to not click at my life sustaining keyboard. Instead, I tried to make clams spit, make homemade rafts float, and find the best blueberry plants to pick plump berries and pop them directly into my mouth. Gregorific and Maine get along juuuust fine.

But while trying to perfectly brown a S'mores marshmallow, hum a periwinkle into waving, and crack a lobster, I forgot to whoop up my recent publication in Epiphany Literary Journal, Issue 15.

So, please, take a double dose of gregorific, jump to this link, and read my *free* short story titled, "The Magician."

I love that my short stories are finding such happy homes. It encourages me to keep growing and learning so I can better carve my novels into beautiful sharpness. Thank you fellow gregorifics! I thrive under your support and loyalty!

Booya! ~gregorific

Before I go drift off into the dark and deep, here is a quote by a Maine author: